This I Believe - Frank Miller

Summary:

Comic book artist Frank Miller believes patriotism is a value that?s critical to our national security.

Website:

http://www.thisibelieve.org

Additional Credits and Funding:

This I Believe is independently produced by This I Believe, Inc. and Atlantic Public Media in association with NPR.

Timely on:

September 11: Refers to September 11 attacks

Tones:

Personal, Political, Thoughtful

Language:

English

Description:

HOST: In the 1950s, people wrote This I Believe essays in response to the fear of nuclear destruction. Fifty years later, the great fear is terrorism. Frank Miller's personal beliefs were *changed* by terrorism, and are now built around his response to it. Here he is with his essay for This I Believe.

MILLER: I was just a boy in the 1960s. My adolescence wasn?t infused with the civil rights struggle, or the sexual revolution, or the Vietnam War, but with their aftermath.
 
My high school teachers were ex-hippies and Vietnam vets. People who protested the war, and people who served as soldiers. I was taught more about John Lennon than I was about Thomas Jefferson.
 
Both of my parents were World War II veterans. FDR-era patriots. And I was exactly the age to rebel against them.
 
It all fit together rather neatly. I could never stomach the flower-child twaddle of the ?60?s crowd and I was ready to believe that our flag was just an old piece of cloth; and that patriotism was just some quaint relic, best left behind us.
 
It was all about the ideas. I schooled myself in the writings of Madison and Franklin and Adams and Jefferson. I came to love those noble, indestructible ideas. They were ideas, to my young mind, of rebellion and independence, not of idolatry.
 
But not that piece of old cloth. To me, that stood for unthinking patriotism. It meant about as much to me as that insipid peace sign that was everywhere I looked: just another symbol of a generation?s sentimentality, of its narcissistic worship of its own past glories.

Then came that sunny September morning when airplanes crashed into towers a very few miles from my home and thousands of my neighbors were ruthlessly incinerated; reduced to ash. Now, I draw and write comic books. One thing my job involves is making up bad guys. Imagining human villainy in all its forms. Now the real thing had shown up. The real thing murdered my neighbors. In my city. In my country. Breathing in that awful, chalky crap that filled-up the lungs of every New Yorker, then coughing it right out, not knowing what I was coughing up.
 
For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about, all those years.
 
Patriotism, I now believe, isn?t some sentimental, old conceit. It?s self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation?s survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don?t all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back.
 
So you?ve got to do what you can to help your country survive. That?s if you think your country is worth a damn. Warts and all.
 
So I?ve gotten rather fond of that old piece of cloth. Now, when I look at it, I see something precious. I see something perishable.

New to PRX?

Learn More | Sign Up